Do movies teach stereotypes?

I was mostly responding to some of the comments that had mentioned the threat of handcuffing creative people to any kind of agenda. I don't think its happening in any substantative way. I think there has definitely been lots of discussion why this would be good and why we should be made aware of the historic lack of diversity. But the only people I believe are really calling for any mandate, or sometimes brand those who don't live up to this mandate as racists (which I agree, is counter productive on all fronts), are the minority and easy to not take very seriously. Sure they are loud, and seem omni-present, and can be a bit of a nuisance, but their influence is pretty minor.



As a person who has worked peripherally in the arts, and also believes diversity is a legitmate concern worth addressing, I've personally never felt an ounce of pressure to live up to anyone else's standards. Maybe some do, but there have alllllwaaaays been different types of pressure placed on the arts to live up to some idealized way. What's happening now, really isn't that different, even if the dumbest voices are now finding ways to get heard in the mainstream. The response to this is to ignore the dumb ones, and take in what you can from the more reasonable ones. But, ultimatley, what you choose to do with what you are hearing is still entirely up to you. Like said, there is no mandate on how you create. You create, they criticize, listen to them or don't, and move on.


In regards to how representation affects how discriminatory a society we are, I absolutely think there is a correalation. Visibility in culture matters to those who maybe until now felt unseen. Also, introducing other cultures through a film to those who have no access to them in day to day life, generates empathy. Reduces otherness. Is it the be all end all fix to the problem. No. But it opens empathetic channels to understanding people we otherwise would not. It is, at the very least, a beginning to over coming stereotypes.



As for your comment about profit margins, creativity (at least of the unorthodox sort) has always been seen as a threat to profit margins. At least by the gate keepers at big studios who are pathetically risk adverse. This also may go for diversity, in some ways, being that studios may think this might smudge their supposedly concrete formulas for success. But I don't think either of these necessarily pan out in the real world. I've never crunched the numbers, but I don't see any reason why either creativity or diversity can't be just as successful. I refuse to assume the dimwits at studios are ever correct about anything. They are creative voids. They've never proven that they really know anything about anything beyond riding specific trends into the ground. To believe them, is to believe that all of civilization wants think dumbed down, and I don't think this is true. Necessarily.

but you are contradicting yourself here: so the vocal morality-police are not threatening, but they are creating issues for people anyways??


Saying that the anti-racist bullies are simply "not a threat and should be ignored" (i'm not talking about anyone in this thread, people here are overall very polite and aren't too dogmatic) is comparable to if I went on facebook and started saying: "No need to worry about Donald Trump! Sure the supporters form militias and buy guns, but the dangerous ones are just an insigficant minority!"


I'm personally not afraid of the trumpees for a lot of different reasons, but who am i to say that people shouldn't be afraid of them after they bomb a synagogue or stab counter-protesters?


In the end, the "idiots" you are referencing do exert an influence over how other people think, and are often responsible for making other people afraid, scared, and un-interested in having conversations about things that are important to them.



If some cringey/generic/racist white dude wants to make another cowboy movie about a battle against "ind-guns", then i'm probably just going to fall asleep...the less i try to assert some false notion of "good and bad art", the happier and more carefree I will be. I would rather just be making my own art for my own reasons.

The online culture of looking for any kind of past or current indiscretion by an artist, however minor or completely out of context, can potentially have a bad influence on the overall culture. It can be bad for art, if artists care to worry about what the most reactionary people out there actually think (they shouldn't). And it can be bad for those whose causes they are supposedly supporting, by making that side seem unreasonable or militant (the vast majority of people calling for inclusiveness in film are neither).



So while they can definitely have some influence, their influence is limited by how seriously we take their points of view. Sometimes, they gain enough traction they can't be avoided. But mostly, these sort of complaints of theirs vanish with a whimper as they find some other faux outrage to froth over. Most people don't have time for this kind of hyperbole in their real lives. If you turn social media off, their worst impulses hardly even bubble to the surface because, at their root, they are deeply irrelevant outside of their desperate attempts to be heard.



Now, when they start arming themselves, that obviously becomes a different situation. But as far as I can tell, a bunch of anonymous people trying to cancel James Gunn for some decades old edgelord tweets, aren't actually the kinds of people into actual real life confrontations. In truth, when it comes to this very particular branch of of people I honestly don't think they even care about the things they claim to care about so much. It frequently feels much too much like vanity than activism, and you can get more than your fill of that by never leaving your home.

Second that.

And that.

Thank you for this comment. I wholeheartedly agree. It is the white dude’s right to do so.

See, you say that, and I don’t disagree. But James Gunn could well be cancelled. Alexi McCammond, the Teen Vogue editor until recently, resigned over her racist tweets. Was forced to, obviously. Her fashion career is over. Gunn may survive this and he may not. Others won’t survive the Twitter mob. There’s no need for an ‘actual life confrontation’ to ruin someone’s life.

Artists are always limited in what they can say. In a libertarian age, Victorian sentiments are unwelcome. In an age of heightened sensitivity, libertarian sentiments are unwelcome. A society that has pro "X" stereotypes, will not welcome anti "X" stereotypes (and vice versa). But there will always be stereotypes because there will always be a cultural narrative. And the stories of that age will reflect and shape these sensibilities. There is no escape from this.

We can merely ask what kind of stereotypes are at play. Are the stereotypes more true than false? Are the stereotypes more false than true? Are the stereotypes more useful than non-useful? Are the stereotypes more non-useful than useful?
It's not that this is a zero-sum game or that all ages are morally equivalent, but rather to ask whether our cultural organs are functioning in a healthy manner.

Artists are like miners working in a mineshaft. They excavate and show us what in the mine of culture, but they have to take care not to make the mineshaft collapse on top of them. Dig and reveal. Dig and move into a new direction. There might be treasure just off to the right. But disregard the environment in which your digging at your own risk.

in my opinion, we don't really have any rights, it's only a legal mechanism that a court may or may not use to protect you from harm. It could also, in the reverse situation, use somebody's rights to imprison you.


I think people complaining is alright but sometimes it's used in an abusive way, like for example, if i thought you were being a jerk or whatever, i would tell you to your face or over a phone call instead of making a tweet or a facebook comment to the world...UNLESS, you were being a jerk over facebook, twitter, a forum, etc.


Speaking of this: i never really understood what Louis CK did to get so much crap, it had something to with masturbating, i think somewhere i read that he backed against the door in the presence of fans so that some woman "had to watch him masturbate", and if that was the case i feel like he kinda deserved all the call-outs and MeToo# stuff...but i guess this is something that's not really even worth bringing up anymore...

Fine, I can accept that. The misunderstanding point was maintly aimed at @Jinnistan, but enough of that. I said so because I do feel creators are being unfairly burdened precisely for the reasons outlined in the OP and the title: that it is common to perceive art as the acceptable way to ‘combat’ stereotypes. I find that just as upsetting and emotionally damaging as the people stereotyped find the stereotypes themselves, and that is my right to feel that way. My feeling is no less valid. You quite reasonably said here, @Takoma11:In reality, I suspect, it is ultimately impossible to be sensitive to anyone here because no one is objective. I have reread your comment a few times thinking how I wanted to reply, but the best I can do is this: the fragility of minorities has been prioritised in recent years, that is no bad thing. Like someone said further up in the thread, the fragility of the creator has never been prioritised anyway: they are supposed to shut up and take it and do what the studios say.

I’m not trying to say you are wrong and I am right. I think we are all past objectivity in this thread. But I am reminded of Adam Kesher in Mulholland Drive, whose only bit of free will was he didn’t want to cast ****ing Camilla Rhodes, and guess what, sir, ‘It is no longer your film.’ Do you honestly think that’s okay?

And it does happen, it has happened in the past, due to nepotism in part but not just that, and now it is happening due to the diversity requirements. You can’t have your Natalie Portman, honey, gotta have Viola Davis. They’re both immensely talented, but I don’t want Viola, I want Natalie. ‘It is no longer your film.’

It’s even more insulting because it’s not due to Viola’s rich husband or daddy, which would be force majeure, but due to Viola’s generic and insulting to her more than anyone else attribute of being a ‘diverse’ hire.

I understand that, but I see in practice that if no one sees at least one non-white actor in a film, they have an issue. It has to be in your face. I don’t know, what I do admit is that this is all inevitable and won’t go anywhere, so it’s pointless to talk about it.

People will just do their casting through box ticking and the white characters will be the ones being schooled on their sins and made to see the error of their ways and then (Tenet)

Yes, we do. But I do genuinely feel the moves to artificially rectify that are detrimental to creativity. I can’t help feeling that way.

I quite like the example. I suppose I would tell them in a neutral way that the fact they wanted to include the sequence in the first place suggests they don’t understand what is sellable nowadays, whether that’s good or bad, and that they should think carefully about that. I have said pretty unpleasant things to friends when truth needed to be voiced so I don’t find the scenario that implausible.

But then again, blackface is extreme. I don’t see any connection between this example and blackface and the scenario where the said friend tells me, upset, that they were told the couple in her divorce drama needs to be mixed race, or it won’t get made. I would commiserate and say no more. This I find even more probable.

Take contemporary British ads - any Brits interested, feel free to jump in. Every couple in mortgage ads is mixed race or homosexual. Every. Couple. All while these demographics are in no way a majority of the population, not even close. This isn’t about providing opportunities (certainly doesn’t help said couples buy more houses), this is over-representation.

Now, you could say this is fair, as it rights a long-running historical wrong. I strongly disagree, but more importantly, on a marketing level, this provokes resentment. I will not go to that bank if I can help it. Neither will the white working class people from the West Midlands because they will feel no one is going out of their way to help them get on the housing ladder.

I agree that ads are not representative of anything and the mixed-race couple will likely still struggle to buy a house, but this young working class white man will feel that he is not valued or seen as a demographic. Why is this not relevant or significant to anyone? The answer is probably that every single type of person should be featured in every single ad, but yeah, good luck selling toilet roll that way, let alone loan schemes.

I will have a hunt, but I think it’s understandable that people won’t publicise that kind of experience because, again, it would end their career.

I don’t know. I understand the logic, but I don’t see why it doesn’t, in that man’s mind. A neighbour of mine stabbed another neighbour’s wife to death when she came over to borrow a cutting board. When asked why, he said she ‘pissed him off’. It happens. How is this different from a white man shooting up a mall from frustration? Joker or any other such films don’t make any suggestion that the shooting had anything to do with the progressive world annoying the protagonist, he just feels misunderstood. Surely a universal theme. He will be punished, so what’s the big deal?

I think it should be blind and fair, free market economy. A study was done recently by two young PR professional ladies in which they sent off the exact same marketing portfolio to ad agencies and asked for a critique. When they sent them off using a male alias, they got more replies and these replies were less formal and more encouraging. The implication is obvious: there is bias. Not arguing with that.

But the appropriate response, to my mind, is to provide internship opportunities (in any industry, incidentally) using blind screenings where CVs are marked ‘CV A’ and ‘CD B’. Once the decision has been made, you’ve hired the intern, you can’t go back, that’s it.

Then at the next stage, you stringently monitor the way all interns work and determine which ones you’ll keep and offer jobs to. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s fair. If they all perform equally well (which never happens), you take it from there.

Yeah, as I said in the PM, you don’t sound mean at all, you are always very civil in putting your points across.

My comment about "actual life confrontation" was specifically in relation to the idea of cultural critics arming themselves in the street. Not that Twitter can't have any negative impact on people.



And I wasn't saying no one has been affected badly by this supposed cancellation culture. I can drop names of people I feel were thrown under the bus by it, and I think how they were treated is disgraceful. My point was I think the amount of times people were completely unjustified in their dismissal from work, or having their character assassinated, is grossly over represented. and it's not that those individual examples don't matter. Of course they do. But it isn't enough to cause some kind of moral panic in artists that the mob is coming to get them. There is no end of artists who are still pushing buttons and have escaped any real retribution. And as I already said before, there has always been cultural elements that have 'cancelled' careers out there. And they have always been problematic, and it's good to address them when they overreach. But I don't feel there is any greater threat to free speech than any other time certain groups were having their careers threatened because of who they are, or who they know, or what they believe.



There is still much that can be complained about though. I really dislike the quick rush to judgement in internet culture. I hate how often redemption seems to be considered a dirty word. And I think there are a lot of bad takes on what is unacceptable behavior. But I also can't help but get tired of the opposite side, where there seems to be a belief there is some kind of creative Armageddon that can all be snugly rested at the feet of 'political correctness' or whatever we want to call it. It just seems like a way too easy scapegoat in an extraordinarily complicated conversation, that is nested with many other related but completely separate considerations. To address it all, it can't help but lead to people misreading eachothers intentions or feelings. But I think it is a bit of a waste of time to give this particular issue of pc culture run amok all of the oxygen in the room. Because it is far from the only or central problem.

Just a general question, not related to any one post here: Are negative stereo types really a thing in movies these days?

The only negative stereo types I can think of in recent movies is stuff like the greedy, middle class white male (think Alex Baldwin characters or greedy wall street types) or the dumb as a doorknob white guy (think Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell & Adam Sandler)...not that I'm complaining I like those actors and to me they're more character tropes than stereo types. But this thread and the OP's question seems to be stating there's active, negative minority stereo types in movies today. I don't think that's the case for the most part (sure with so many movies anything can be seen, but it don't seem like a trend).

Every time I read threads like this, I always see posters prop up nightmare scenarios that could POSSIBLY, EVENTUALLY happen as comparably troublesome and meritorious as dealing with actual, systemic problems that are currently happening and impacting lives in far greater, more serious, and most importantly ACTUAL ways.

I’ll believe in the Viola Davises of the world replacing Natalie Portmans when they have disproportionate roles offered and higher pay. I’ll believe in the director whose career was destroyed and they no longer get to make movies because they flagrantly included a racial stereotype in their films.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue living in the real world where I can go pop on the latest right-wing Cinestate produced Zahler flick, featuring a brutal cop protagonist played by Mel Gibson, where they spout pro-cop/police brutality rhetoric while the only black leads are criminals. Which currently has a... 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Won’t somebody please think of these poor filmmakers who can’t say anything without an angry tweet?!?

Count the amount of Latino and Hispanic roles in Hollywood that don’t involve the cartel, gangs, being foreign, or being a low-wage worker.

Well, I think it is very possible to hold sensitivity toward two groups (even opposing groups) at the same time. I can both sympathize with someone who has been repeatedly denied access to an industry AND I can sympathize with someone who believes they have been passed over for a job in favor of a "diversity hire". In a fully racist society, people in minority groups know why they aren't getting the job. In a perfectly equal society, all people should feel confident that they are being hired because they are the best person for the job. Right now many industries are in a transitional state where the people being hired don't always know why they are or aren't getting a job, and that can be really frustrating.

I do think that there actually has been a lot of historical sympathy toward the creator. I think that a lot of bad, damaging, even criminal behavior from creators has been excused under the umbrella of the "temperamental artist." (I just happened to read this article this afternoon: https://news.avclub.com/rita-wilson-...ess-1846756743)

I think that there is an entire range of relationships that can exist between a writer/director and the studio that is financing their project. Some creators are lucky enough to have enough clout that they can retain "final word" on their projects. Others are really at the mercy of the studio. I don't think it is a matter of right or wrong (obviously unless a contract says one thing and then a party does something that violates that agreement). I do think that when you are dependent on someone else's money to create your art, you open yourself up to the person holding the purse having sway over your art. It's the double-edged sword of working with a studio instead of independently.

What film is this? Or is this a hypothetical example?

And I don't think it's common for a creator to write a part for a white person only to see it recast as a Black person. If there is a real example of this I'd be very open to reading about it.

It's a reaction that is a result of many, many years of under-representation and disproportionately negative representation. I will agree that some people only engage this question on a superficial level, and that can be really frustrating. I think that such knee-jerk hot takes ultimately do more harm than good. But that shouldn't be used to dismiss the very valid concerns that some people have about representation.

There should be room for films with all-white or mostly-white casts, just like there should be room for films with all-Asian or mostly-Asian casts. But right now, the former is much, much more the norm and I understand why some people are tired of it.

Ironically, the cure is more films with more diverse representation. If more films were realistic on this front (especially films that take place in locations like modern New York), then it wouldn't stand out so much when there is a film without non-white characters.

SPOILERS!!

White characters still make up an easy majority of the heroes in films, self-sacrificing or not (and usually not). Rather than being schooled on their sins, it seems more common to me that white characters protect or defend minorities as part of validating their worth, and it's usually used to highlight the bravery or growth of the white character.

How do you non-artificially rectify that in a way that doesn't take decades?

But aren't we saying that dictating choices about their films to creators is censorship and inhibiting their creativity?

Again, I'd love a specific example here.

I just googled "Lloyd's Bank mortgage advert" and most of the faces I'm seeing are white. A white hand over another white hand. A white woman with a white child. One ad seems to feature a Black or mixed race man and woman.

You say it's over-representation, but is it possible they are trying to reach out to demographics that have been under-served by their companies in the past?

So just to be clear: you would boycott a company because you did not feel that you were being represented or reached out to by them?

How is this different than people speaking out against movie studios that do not represent them adequately?

I feel that if you're going to assert that careers are being derailed and creators are being horribly stifled, there has to be at least one solid example.

The big deal is that the film is sympathetic to his character overall and presents multiple sequences that seemingly justify his anger and eventual violence. You say it is a universal theme, but I don't see a lot of films where Black/Asian/Hispanic men are the ones pushed to the edge.

That would be nice. Unfortunately, bias almost always finds a way to sneak in. In my (very long!) discussion with my parents about this issue this afternoon, my dad told me about a guy who was on a hiring panel with two other men. One man was going through the resumes and sorting into "interested" and "uninterested" piles. He was only looking at the second page of each resume. The guy realized he was sorting based on which undergrad institution they'd attended, and would you be shocked to learn that he was "interested" in every applicant from his alma mater (and a smattering of other schools from the same geographic area)?

I think that having reasonable diversity standards is an acceptable practice. The categories are so broad! Racial minority, female, LGBTQ+, a person with a disability. If you have a crew of 10 people, having one woman, one gay man, and one Latino person meets the 30% standard.

(And internship opportunities is one of the ways you can meet the diversity standards for the Oscars, so there you go!)

It's troubling to me that some do-gooders sound off about throwing artworks of the past under the bus for being prejudicial. If this is the case, then we must close ourselves off to all art from the past, as it is all prejudicial. Indeed, people of the future will undoubtedly find our art prejudicial, so the only safe course of action would be to not partake at all. Nonsense.

What artists do is to work within the confines of their age. They have to. Many artists of generations past took significant risks to help shift the conversation towards today's moral sensibilities -- much moreso than today's moralizers who take no risks in descrying "sins of the past." We have the world we have today, in part, because they had the courage to work within a paradigm and to leverage small adjustments to the conversation.

And indeed, if we do not commit to the chronocentrism of our age (that tendency every generation has to think that they are the most progressive, sensitive, enlightened, and righteous), we might even learn a thing or two from past prejudices, as we ourselves be "off the mark."

well said: if people are going to criticize or moralize (morality..ew...), it should be about artwork that someone is currently making, and also, nobody should feel obliged to respect or like anybody's artwork either.


It's cowardly to talk about the dead at the expense of the living.



Burning or framing a painting are the same in the end!

*fixed*


lol, nepotism is just Gawd's Will!

True, good point.

Well, it’s referred to as ‘non-traditional casting’, but it’s all over the place. The Witcher is a very good example (below), but so is Red in Shawshank Redemption who is (the clue is in the name!) described as ‘white and Irish’. It would not in and of itself necessarily be a problem if society didn’t feel the need to sell this as a good, progressive development.

https://www.ranker.com/list/black-ac...ers/lisa-waugh

Yes, I suppose so. But if we want to talk quotas, we need quotas for all-white films too; and guarantees that they will be considered for all awards and not penalised, that Moorhead and Benson can get an Oscar or some kind of cash incentive (they could use a grant) with their two white guys story.

They may make up a majority, for sure, but for any quota to be fair it has to determine the needed share for every type of thing, not just the one deemed ‘underrepresented’. You didn’t comment about Alexi. She was a child when she wrote the tweets, yes, I would tell off the **** out of my child if they were stupid enough to do that, but did she deserve to see her professional life end when she was at such a high point?

Here:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.f...ars-later/amp/

Yes, but this is my supposed friend and an informal conversation. I would understand the frustration on some level is all. And the annoyance. I would commiserate and say I fully agree she should be able to make what she likes, but the world doesn’t work like that. See, if she wanted to make a film where the protagonist violently raped his girlfriend in the third act and then strangled her because, I don’t know, she shot his mother, and had been blocked from making that, I would commiserate equally and this time, I would say she should continue submitting and find another studio that’s more understanding of what she is trying to say in the story. She is trying to write this man’s POV and the violent rape and murder is his revenge, I’d say, try to ground it very well emotionally and go for it. The reason I would suggest she doesn’t do the blackface plot line, regardless of my personal feelings on the subject, is because as a PR professional whose job it is to sell ideas I would believe firmly she stands no chance of selling that, no matter what. Hence why waste her energy trying? Which is in itself, you are right, pathetic and sad, and shows I have become disillusioned about the power of the free market and free speech.

Having discussed this now, I wonder if I wouldn’t leave it and see what would happen with her unfortunate production without my intervention.

This article: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.t...servative/amp/ uses examples that are as specific as you can be without outing people who think differently.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.t...fall-woke/amp/ here we have a specific example of David Doucet who lost his job. For the people in the back, here is online bullying having a ‘real’ impact. Catherine Deneuve hasn’t worked since 2019 when she became a vocal champion of the ‘anti-woke’ way of life. The singer Mennel is ‘cancelled’ for good.

This article:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/ne...-cancel-happy/ details how Jordan Peterson’s career (see also ‘wealth protects you from discrimination’) has been affected by the ‘cancel mob’.

This article https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/reaso...-groves/%3famp describes an actual vendetta bankrolled by the NYT to ruin the life of someone who said a horrible thing as a child once. She was kicked out of university. This is sick, vindictive behaviour.

I mean, if so, they are getting better, thank God for that. Naturally, when you Google things, you get all the versions of one ad. I meant the ones I see in the actual physical bank when I come in.

They sure are, and the same is true about revisionist history films and the Queen Mary and Queen Charlotte films which make the characters Black when they weren’t. I happen to find this immensely unhelpful, akin to encouraging imperial guilt which only makes the white population resentful and essentially guilt-tripping people into things. Making them feel bad about themselves for no reason. I don’t like that is all. Was reading The Atlantic recently, which I love, and there was an oldish article exploring why ‘Black’ should be capitalised and ‘white’ should not. Please note I always do the above without question.

The article rejected the view that this is exclusively because the Neo-Nazis on the internet have already claimed the term. Makes sense, but you are still capitalising one and not the other, prioritising one over the other, sending a message of showing preference. It’s the same rationale as you cite in relation to the overly diverse ads, i.e. that this rebalanced a previously unbalanced space. I understand the idea, but I think you cannot favour one group over another to right a historical wrong, especially in this symbolic way, which is in a sense more insulting to the others.

Equality is a lovely idea but this is nothing like it, this is bullying people into feeling bad. The last time Germany was forced to pay reparations for past sins... we know what happened. Honestly, @Yoda, if I got banned it would leave me very disappointed, but if I just broke a rule, so be it. I do think this is important to acknowledge.

A lot of right-wing extremist violence stems from being made to feel guilty. I know of a boy at school, aged just 6, who was kissed by another boy in the toilets on the lips, hard. He complained to his mum that he was made to feel uncomfortable and she complained to the school. The boy got kicked out because his reaction was ‘not tolerant of differences’ and so his family must be intolerant too. I work with his mother. You will say these are not ‘concrete’ examples and I understand why, but surely you see that anyone complaining about that would ruin their life, their name would get into the papers. It is obvious, I feel. The same way we don’t plaster gang rape victims’ names all over the media. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. People have to be unbelievably brave to stand up and say, ‘This happened to me’, and most people are not.

I understand this is as extreme as the blackface example, but I do think making people perpetually feel bad will never benefit anyone. I have seen evidence that white kids do feel that these ads are, if not excluding, but then guilt-tripping them. I was running a creative writing class for 10-year-olds and a kid asked whether he ‘had’ to have a Black character to pass. I was at a loss.

I understand that Black children are damaged by stereotypes, but so are white children who learn at school that they descend from the most bigoted, and if they’re lucky and sit tight and give way to the underrepresented, they can perhaps one day atone. I know real teenage boys who feel bullied every minute of the day by the girls at their school who feel they are untouchable.

Not because I wasn’t represented, because I didn’t approve of their virtue signalling. I am not the said white man from the West Midlands. I would ‘boycott them’, if you like, because my libertarian values don’t align with theirs and they annoy me by wearing their ‘woke’ values on their sleeve where they could have been more restrained. I would do the same if a company, I don’t know, was only hiring women or did anything else that I consider extreme.

I can’t find the article I want just now but I will, so far, I have found this: https://www.hattonjameslegal.co.uk/a...mployment-law/

As we see here, ‘egalitarian sexism’ is kind of-sort of legal, sadly, so yes, I would boycott that business due to their values not aligning with mine. I would actually tell them because I get carried away when this all comes up that I think it is disgraceful that they do that. Show me one company where you can say you don’t hire women and not be obliterated. These are double standards and I despise that. I know some of the things I say may feel like double standards to you, but I am doing my best to be objective and I don’t feel the female-only company owner is.

Also see a female-only plumbing company from Australia, I would boycott them for the same reason.https://www.femalechoiceplumbing.com.au/

By the way, people are welcome to boycott companies due to a perceived lack of diversity. The issue is whether the company should court these customers so desperately at the expense of others. I do think white young men are being made to feel they are in the back of the queue. And guess what, when you have a diverse ad with all types of people standing side by side, the white person will nearly always be a woman. Even that I find to be on the nose and sort of, you know, condescending. As in, Oh, we couldn’t possibly show a young white straight man for a change, that’s a big no-no.

As I said, I think the said people are likely to cut their losses and crawl away to lick their wounds.

One of the best examples of being pressured to diverse-cast is The Witcher writer Lauren Hissrich, who actually went as far as to promise fans she wouldn’t change a character’s gender or race if she found herself “feeling ‘liberal’ that day.” (Her words). This, I believe, shows her original intention as a creator was to keep everyone white. She won’t admit it now, but come on, she made a public statement promising not to do it at the time. The original is an all-white Polish series yet she ended up racebending. The Witcher has been on a hiatus for ages so I guess that didn’t go down well.

Samuel L. Jackson was cast as Fury in the Marvel stuff, the 1997 Cinderella was racebent and Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel, an apparently explicitly white mermaid, in 2019 (for some reason this makes me laugh, can’t explain).

Well, I may be a hardened cynic but that’s just life. I have experienced my fair share of Ivy League **** from all sides, from being forced to apply to being bullied for not wanting to go there. People want to preserve the status quo in all things, we can lament that but this is human nature.

But the same favouritism can be and is shown to someone’s literal neighbours (see Matt Hancock of the U.K. and his pub owner neighbour who got an eye-watering COVID contract). I mean, why is it any more fair if the diversity hire gets a free pass in the above CV situation and the white West Midlands guy (not that his CV would even make it onto the recruiter’s desk, but no matter) does not? It is just reverse favouritism, please note as we agreed I am steering clear of the term ‘discrimination’ in this context.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.t...rinkle-in-time

This is not directly relevant to your points above, but I’ve been trying to find it earlier and couldn’t. It explores the ways in which ‘progressive’ films are lauded just for being diverse and pushed to the forefront of marketing campaigns at the expense of other films, even if the diverse contender is ‘objectively awful’. You are probably right that this will eventually sort itself out and things will even out in 50+ years (hope I won’t be dead), but these years are going to be ****ing tough.

I should hope you could spell ‘burden’, but, alas... hope is a thing with feathers... if it was an attempt at humour, apologies...

Edit: oh, I’m so sorry, I guess you mean a mule born of a horse and a she-ass which belongs to a white man!

Nepotism is life. Removing life’s obstacles for some people but not others is reverse... see, @Takoma11, I’m trying! Reverse prejudice.

Would have never in a million years called Scott Rudin, whom you’ve used twice as an example, a ‘creator’ or ‘artist’ in any shape or form. He’s an admin guy. A random generic Hollywood exec, if you ask me. Would agree with your point with regards to, say, Hitchcock. But let’s not mix up bullying bosses (again, in any industry) who are so good at what they do that they are left alone and what we were originally discussing, which is creators having to adapt to generic ‘inclusivity’ standards. Not the same thing at all to me. The very idea of anyone saying that ‘another white face on the screen’ is not needed to the creator is absurd, regardless of context.

‘Force majeure’ is not a literal term, it is used to indicate circumstances out of someone’s control, which nepotism is.